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Linking School Choice and Third Party Government: Escaping Requires We Recognize the Incarceration

This marks the end of the Trilogy about declarations (insufficiently recognized) to use the powers of governments at every level to close the gap “between the current state of the world and what would be ideal…perfectionism ought instead to inspire a constant striving to make things better. Democracy, in other words, should be viewed as a work in progress.” That vision of making human wellbeing the new purpose of governments needs a particular type of citizen who is a useful mixture of malleable, aspirational, and reliable in their likely future behaviors. That of course is what all these education reforms have really been about and why there has been so much deceit. That quote is from the upcoming inaugural issue of U-Penn’s Journal of Law and Public Affairs on using law and regulation to force societies to provide for the general welfare.

Rule of Law, in other words, needs to join the terms ‘public policy’ and ‘standards-based education’ as transformative tools that few seem to sufficiently appreciate. Let me quote from a second paper that is also cited in books and papers citing the 1990 Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools where we began this Trilogy. It is by two poli sci profs, Jack Knight and James Johnson, but it said not to cite without permission. We will simply discuss it then as it pointed out in 2005 that the ‘problem solving approach to ideas and institutions’ holds that “our ideas, principles, practices and institutions and so forth simply are tools for navigating a social and political world that is shot through with indeterminacy…a pragmatist stance encourages us to place pressure on our cherished beliefs, institutions and so forth. It encourages a broadly experimental approach both to inquiry and, more importantly for present purposes, to politics.”

Now, most of us with experience in adult life and a solid grasp of history, who are not on the Gravy Train to get revenue from being a provider of stipulated services, can recognize that such aspirations will not end well. Maybe that’s why we are not supposed to know what K-12 education reforms have always really been about. After all if someone has an actual aspiration that “political debate must impose restrictions on the structure of individual preferences,” that mischievous, authoritarian goal is best achieved in secret and masked with duplicity if anyone does notice something is up. Tiptoeing through the footnotes of all these papers, pulled up repeated references to a John Hopkins prof, Lester Salaman, and a textbook called The Tools of Government: A Guide to the New Governance .

I guess the students who went through this kind of unappreciated inquiry-oriented assault on their values and conceptions of knowledge when they were younger want to study the theories used on them once they get to university. No wonder they have been so childlike in their responses to the recent US Presidential election. Many have been taught that the “role of government in the twenty-first century” is “more important than ever. The growing complexity and integration of social, economic, and political life virtually guarantees this, as does the need for a keeper of the rules of engagement among various institutions and sectors.” That was me boldfacing that integration since it has been way too unpublicized as well.

Before I explain what Third Party Government is, since the textbook says it is quite advanced in the United States, and that the “last fifty years have witnessed a remarkable revolution in the basic technology of public action in the tools or instruments used to address public problems,” let’s remember that K-12 ‘education reform’ and School Choice are merely tools to effect the desired transformations without any need to get our consent. No need to risk our saying “No Thanks” either. If we wonder why so many supposedly ‘conservative’ and pro-market think tanks have been created at great expense, the language about “bring a wide assortment of social actors into the business of responding to public needs” is a most helpful clue.

Education reforms are definitely needed if the view of government and “the role of public management is not to deliver services but to promote community, to help citizens articulate shared interests, to bring the proper players to the table and broker agreements among them, and to function as ‘proxy citizens.'” Just this past week Greg Forster of EdChoice put out a vision of Accountability that stated what he called the “real goal of education.” It sounded remarkably similar to what is supposedly needed under the requirements of the New Governance and Third Party Government:

“nurturing individuals who achieve and appreciate things that are true, good, and beautiful as faithful citizens of a free and diverse community committed to living in harmony.” The typical family couldn’t even pull that off over an extended Thanksgiving meal and that’s to be the real goal of education that students must “genuinely internalize?” Faithful to whom we could ask? Let’s go back then to the textbook that is being so forthcoming.

“the breadth of the problems government has been called on to address coupled with prevailing antibureaucracy sentiments make this [governments as the dominant supplier of public services] practically, as well as politically, impossible. Government needs its third-party partners both to legitimize and to execute the responsibilities it has taken on. [Note that this is NOT Free Enterprise whatever the Heritage Foundations writes].

On the other hand, however…government simply lacks the authority and independence to enforce its will on other actors the way this concept [monopoly on the legitimate use of force] implies.”

Now I will stop the quote to point out again that this is precisely what learning standards like the Common Core and those previously tied to Time for Results or outcomes-based education sought to do. It is what competency-based education, properly explained, now does–enforce its will for this lucrative conception of Third Party Government on its citizens. Secretly and nonconsensually and hiding behind phrases like School Choice or Internationally Competitive. Under the New Governance tenets and its need for what EdChoice called ‘faithful citizens’:

“What, then, is the role that government should play in the new governance? And how important is it? The answer is that government must serve as the ‘balance wheel’ of the new systems of collaborative problem solving that will increasingly exist. Its function, as we have suggested, is to activate the needed partnerships and to make sure that public values [common good], broadly conceived, are effectively represented in the collaborative systems that result.” Let’s shift away from quoting the aspirations to how it invisibly comes into effect. Following up on all the False Narratives involving the Common Core and who was pushing them I came across numerous references to a 2011 paper I had not previously heard of called Closing the Door on Innovation that was supposedly a response to a March 2011 Manifesto from the Shanker Institute. http://educationnext.org/closing-the-door-on-innovation/

Education reformer Jay Greene wrote the story on Education Next and then the same Greg Forster noted above wrote a piece as well for the Public Discourse from the Witherspoon Institute that is tied to the American Principles Project that has written so many papers and offered up testimony on the nature of the Common Core. https://app.box.com/s/s1q0hmgauyo1t9fafrbh is a capture of what the document looked like as it is now hard to find. To make a long process of discovery short, the Shanker Manifesto struck me as how both sides intended for education reform to work at the local, school level. That Innovation report seemed staged to me to create a narrative about what the Common Core was intended to do that would probably have worked better if I had not been writing Credentialed to Destroy back in 2011 and tracking the actual implementation.

What really caught my eye though was the PEPG-Harvard’s Program on Educational Policy and Governance that was behind the Closing the Door on Innovation. PEPG has sponsors from what were supposed to be two differing sides of the Common Core debate. It clearly built on the work of that 1990 Brookings book on School Choice and had all sorts of players like Greene back when he was a poli sci prof at U-Texas (Austin) and AEI’s Rick Hess back when he was a Poli Sci prof at UVa. Seriously, if education is really the best way to achieve political and social transformation, PEPG’s work and the School Choice meme generally all make so much more sense. We have former Governor Jeb Bush as the Chair of the PEPG Advisory Committee and the Gates, Bradley, Koch, and Friedman Foundations all working together. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/sponsors_affiliates.htm

To use one of my favorite metaphors, Harvard is clearly where the Right and Left Pincers surrounding the Common Core/education reform narrative come to play and plan transformations around poli sci and sociology theories. Its first conference was in September 1996 about the same time as Fordham took over the Educational Excellence Network functions, as we saw in the last post. Ed reform can feel like a track relay race with all the exchanges of batons, but PEPG is formally a program sponsored by Fordham, Harvard, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. If anyone thinks I am stretching, pull up the original Fall 1997 Annual Report and look at the presentation by John Brandl and his desire to “change the way we govern our schools” to “inspire other-regarding behavior in our students.” The omnipresence of communitarianism we keep running into behind the real implementation makes much more sense once we read that ‘communities is a promising policy instrument.’

Here’s the full quote and a good place to end as we mull over what is really being done to us all in the name of education reforms.

“Consequently, using communities is a promising policy instrument to attain social objectives when neither bureaus nor markets can be counted on to do so. Besides producing services, communities nurture and protect us all, cut costs, create social capital, obviate the need for government services and engender civic virtue. We need a constitutional moment, a time when those holding public office reconstruct government to align the motivations of individuals with public purposes. If they do not do so, the grand responsibilities of government, starting with education, will not be met.”

I did warn everyone that the phrase Local Control was essentially like being thrown into the Briar Patch if one has revolutionary social and political intentions.

128 thoughts on “Linking School Choice and Third Party Government: Escaping Requires We Recognize the Incarceration”

Ah, shades of David Hornbeck and Lester Salaman’s book “Human Capital” from the 90s. We’ve been manipulated and squeezed into accepting controls for so many years that even those of us who are old enough to remember when it started and recognized it for what it was are tired of fighting it. Your recognition of the newer waves of this battering sea gives a ray of hope to continue to resist. Thanks.

This would have been financed and assigned while Ms DeVos was still on the AEI Board so this is pertinent to charters and SChool Choice generally as well. Notice the sneaking in of task. Not necessarily a question.

Perhaps this is a bit off topic–but related to education. My sophomore came home with information about the HOBY Leadership seminar–I googled it and it says that they use a Social Change Model of Leadership Development. Does anyone have any experience with this? Is it leftist?

State Senator Scott Hammond (R-NV), whom you discussed in a post last year, gave lip service to repealing Common Core in Nevada in 2015 and denied any connection between Rob Enlow who wrote the NV ESA bill and Gates/Bush/Common Core. His insistence on either the state test (SBAC) or “any” nationally norm-referenced assessment as the “accountability” measure for the ESA was the give-away that students would not be free of government control no matter the appearance of “minimal” restrictions in the law.

Further, conversations between homeschool freedom leaders in various states and Enlow have been disheartening at best. The man has no concept of what private, self-funded homeschooling is, nor the depth of our fight for the last 35+ years to be free of government controls in all 50 states (not fully accomplished yet, and ESAs are very real threat to the freedoms we have gained).

You are welcome. What I did was read and systematically download every one of the PEPG Annual Reports and as many of the presentations as I could find. The names that do crop up. Forster is also tied to the Kern Family Foundation that is listed as a supporter. I went to a Heartland presentation about a month ago specifically to ask about the ESAs and assessments. Lennie Jarrett, Heartland’s Project Manager for Education Transformation immediately began to substitute the word tests when I asked explicitly about assessment. The deceit runs deep and the hope is every one will believe the words are synonyms, which they are not. In the next post we will shift to the ed school where many of the same profs are also on the faculty. They at least discuss the morality of using these behavioral science tools to monitor and constrain consciousness itself.

I did not realize until I heard Lennie Jarrett that Reform School News is distributed free of cost to every member of every state legislature in the US. That’s a wide reach for what is essentially SChool Choice propaganda. Another Annual Report stated that the National Center on School Choice at Vanderbilt is tied to PEPG and was created with a five year $13.3 million grant from the fed ED IES, the research arm. It is tied to Herbert Walberg, who is on the Board of Heartland and was also on the Stanford Koret Task Force with a number of people who have featured in this Trilogy.

Clint Bolick, who was hugely influential in Arizona’s School Choice push shows up on the list of EEN Educational Policy Committee from the last post. Hammond did say explicitly when I haerd him speak a year ago that the vision for Nevada’s ESAs came from the Friedman Institute. Vernon Smith stated at a 2012 School Choice conference in Arizona that ESAs are a product of experimental economics theories that turn out to be grounded in psychology. I have another book that created these alternative assessments that admits it is all grounded in the psychological theories of decision-making under uncertainty of Daniel Kahnemann and Tversky. Cited by name so there was a reason I recognized those theories as tied to what ESSA called mandatory assessments of Higher Order Thinking Skills. That also fits with that post above. The new ESSA regulations simply subsume HOTS in what are called ‘high-quality assessments’–precisely what Texas seems to want to require for homeschoolers to have access to ESAs. Of course the poor parents will be focused on their expenses and the possibility of leftover amounts for college.

Settled in for a storm here, snow and freezing rain. Taco soup prepared if we loose power.

Read this in my email this morning.

“When people with different incomes live in the same communities, send their kids to the same schools, visit the same libraries, shop at the same stores, and attend the same community events, everyone benefits. Yet few people understand what “socioeconomic mixing” is or why it’s important for our society, and even fewer support the policies that promote it. To the contrary, most people think about economic segregation as a matter of personal concern–not as a social problem that deserves a societal response.”

Thanks LL and good luck with the storm. That fits with the new funding formula that will follow the child that Georgia is going to that was presented at a Georgia Public Policy Foundation breakfast yesterday. GPPF would not take any questions from the audience and they had to be submitted on index card to allow culling if someone was asking something that was not to be part of the narrative. So as I was cooking greens yesterday for much the same reason and marrying the federal focus on Equity in Outcomes to paying more based on various ‘needs’ including poverty and ELL, it hit me. Historically from ESEA on, the education focus federally was redistribution but at the state level it was developmental.

Now it will be redistributional at both levels with the students essentially acting as sources of revenue for the poor parts of existing districts as well as the state generally. No cap on the redistributions asked for either. That is perfectly consistent with the vision for the Human Development Society, which explicitly calls for there not to be economic benefits to being in an urban vs rural area. Education then, like healthcare, is a jobs program. Meeting ‘needs’ so everyone’s wellbeing becomes assured by governments with private companies generating revenue that way.

Let’s face it that desired ‘societal response’ is what law students are being taught is the purpose of the law. To create that desired ‘just’ society where wealth and abilities become assets available to meet the needs of others. Your bright, verbally precocious child becomes an asset at school to boost the vocabularies and verbal sophistication of the less advanced classmates. No need for them to learn additional words. That would not be equitable.

This is, of course, why they have to push for inclusion. When you get rid of honors classes in high school, throw the brightest in with the struggling students and then grade the school/teachers on how well they can “close the gap”, the overall pace of learning is slowed considerably and the top students are held back from what they would be able to achieve in a class of their intellectual peers.

BTW, if anyone doubts the “dumbing down” (likely most anyone reading this already knows it’s a fact), in a few recent conversations, I encountered some very bright high schoolers who didn’t know: 1) the word “itinerary”; 2) the word “condolences”; 3) what an aqueduct is and 4) pretty much anything about geography. It’s working like a charm…

None of those words you cited fit with the “personalization of the learning experience”. Plus a larger vocabulary is not equitable and may allow thinking outside the range specified in a given ‘domain’ now.

Sure goes a long way toward explaining those Catholic Curriculum Frameworks. I just finished the chapter by Hideaki Koizumi, who is at least up front that this is an educational vision designed to create the kind of mind and personality that will ensure “the welfare of all human beings” in the future.

My best friend’s kids attended Ross. After several years in this nuthouse she put them in the public school. ( much to fancy hubs chagrin) In the Hamptons there is nothing else. They are at east coast boarding schools now in high school and even those are contaminated.
I can get a full rundown on Ross from my friend if anyone wants insider scoop.

It is quite a book. Ross was founded with the money Steve Warner got from creating the Time warner media conglomerate. I had never heard of the school when I ordered the book. I Kurt Fischer said it was their ‘research school’ and the title matched the real implementation I thought I should get it. Howard Gardner involved and Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi as well.

The explanation of their ‘cultural history’ curriculum fits with David Christian and Bill Gates’ vision of Big History. Also very tied in with NYU and a model for Sweden in dealing with schools with high populations of immigrants. Any personal insights are always welcome. It is a school designed to change who the students are from the inside-out, but that is now the template for all schools.

This from 2015 http://pwescr.org/PWESCR_Handbook_on_ESCR.pdf is also fascinating as it says that during the Cold War the West saw rights only in terms of civil and political rights and the East, including China and Russia, insisted all were to have Economic, Social and Cutural Rights as well. That would be Marx’s Human development Society even if no one mentions his name. According to that in 1987, the distinction was dropped and both sides agreed to promote the ESC vision of what were to be ‘human rights’. That fits with Project Education Reform: Time for Results and the Educational Excellence Conference and what PEPG seems to be trying to get fully in place.

Page 7 shows Michael Posner from Oregon who we have talked about. This certainly puts American Principles Project’s work in a new light as well as why they would misrepresent the nature of Tranzi OBE. Makes so much of the deceit so much clearer as religion after major religion seems to have designs on these behavioral science methods without disclosing that to parents and parishoners. Notice that was also sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. They are thus tied to the redefinition of Liberty in Communitarian terms we tracked to the Philly Constitution Center as well as the Science of Virtues. That in turn is connected to APP’s sister entity, the Witherspoon Institute through John Haldane. The longer paper with the list of participants also has a prof from Notre Dame.

Well, a funny thing happened on my way to catching up on my ISC reading. I made a detour to check on the latest youtube offering of Update Brazil. And guess who was in midstream of an interview with Jeff Nyquist?

I can’t speak with any authority on that, but I would infer that those churches seek to be all things to all people in order to attract membership. And if that means diluting doctrine or being “kinder, gentler” so as not to offend, so be it. Am I right? “NuChurch,” as I call it, grew out of a desire to “modernise” and jettison “outdated” notions, like dogma and moral absolutes. It was more a movement spearheaded by Catholic intellectuals than the pastors in the pulpits wishing to ingratiate themselves to their parishioners. But they have ended up in the same place. Doctrine, the notion of truth, including hard truths, are under assault. The battle raging right now in the Catholic Church between those forces and those of orthodoxy are probably more violent than anything experienced within the Church since the Arian heresy of the 4th century. It is an extremely painful time to be a Catholic.

Did you see the article on “A New Science of Humanity: A trial for the Integration of Natural Sciences and the Humanities Towards Human Security and Well-Being” among the essays in that linked What is our knowledge about the human being that came out of that MBE conference at the Vatican in 2003. Hideaki Koizuma wrote an alarming chapter in the book Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World: The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era” from 2010. I got it because Kurt Fischer was cited as writing a chapter and I had been mulling over whether the Opportunity School District Georgia’s governor, Atlas members and financiers, and others wanted was really what MBE visions refer to as a ‘research school’ where these theories can be applied. After all that would be a demographically controllable group with kids who could be classified as Pre-Literate because of family back grounds. Imagine my surprise when the true history of IMBES came out and Antonio Damasio is also hyping the Ross School who is also co-director of that same imaging center where the prof was fatally stabbed by a grad student a week ago. Koizumi said this is the aim:

“This paper attempts a partial 3-D spiral synthesis of brain science, developmental behavioral science, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy and ethics, based on physics and biology, using completely non-invasive high-order brain-function imaging, with a goal to integrating them in a New Science of Humanity…On the other hand, ‘hatred’, which also emerged during evolution, is a persistent and intense emotion, sometimes passed down to descendants. hidden at the bottom of a culture. Current international conflicts involve ‘chains of hatred and violence’. Research to eliminate such hazardous chains, combined with such concepts as ‘human dignity’ and ‘acceptance of diversity’, is highly practical, substantial and desired by people worldwide.”

I need to take a break in the quoting because all these people and places being cited appear to me to be tied to that BRAIN Initiative we have covered down to that Amy Gutman-led Ethics Group. This might be a good morning for a Bloody Mary with this quote which fits with what we have intuited, but which is quite explicit. This is from later in the Koizumi paper and remember he works for Hitachi.
“For the first time in our history, we humans are close to obtaining a methodology for reading minds from the outside. We must be cautious and meticulously so, however, in our approach to the possibility that even a small part of the mind might be exposed. To address this ethical issue, an innovative ethical committee to concurrently connect and conduct the practice and study of ethics is being prepared under international alliance and guidance. One of the principal goals of the New Science of Humanity is to understand ‘learning’ and ‘education’ as an exact science. In this paper, I have attempted to prepare guidelines for basic ethics through an overview and integration, since a desirable future for humans will be based on ‘education’, in its extended meaning. We are committed to the achievement of human security and well-being.”

Can you see why blindly advocating for charters and School Choice which hide language that fits this MBE template is so dangerous? How the deceit surrounding the Common Core is actually enabling Goebbels level research on our children? This is not a ‘No Harm, No Foul’ level of verbal jousting on who is right about the nature of education reforms. Who knew that what I warned about in my book was just the beginning of the desired machinations or that the neural effects were not just a result, but the whole point of Radical Ed Reforms like Tranzi OBE and competency-based education now. Under these realities of expressed intentions, pretending the Common Core is just a vision of preparation for the workplace in a planned economy is criminal.

Any talk of ethics by these people ( these humans) is laughable. They are megalomaniacally motivated like blood lust they cannot stop themselves. A mad subculture of child mind rapists/theives and murderers. I see it that way. It is physical abuse. It only can perpetuate with the end justifies the means routine, which is counter religious.
What must it be like to live and breathe and wake lying all day long? Thats what psychology was invented for permission.

It is actually John Paul II who is quoted by Argentinian Antonio Battro as saying this: “His Holiness said to the academicians: ‘Scientists themselves perceive in the study of the human mind the mystery of a spiritual dimension which transcends cerebral physiology and appears to direct all of our activities as free and autonomous beings, capable of responsibility and love [notice that order], and marked with dignity. This is seen by the fact you have decided to expand your research to include aspects of learning and education, which are specifically human activities.'”

Battro also hypes this quote from Santiago Ramon y Cajal and used it as the epigraph to the introduction to the book The Educated Brain: Essays in Neuroeducation that came out of this 2003 meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. I think this is why the Pioneer/APP report misrepresents the nature of the Common Core. Everyone targeting the student’s belief and value systems to control the future decisions that are likely to reach at an unconscious or deliberate level and then grounding it at a neurobiological level is just not a winning sales pitch. It is an accurate statement though. The true communism always had to control consciousness and that is what we are back to. It’s what the theory of Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete was all about. It is no accident it was created in the very year–1962-that the Marxist Humanist vision launched globally with the West in its sights primarily. Here’s that last quote, which gives way to the favorite metaphor of neurons being the ‘mysterious butterflies of the soul’ to be targeted by a new vision of education that fits with Tranzi OBE and systems thinking and the vision these charters lock into place legally. It also fits with the language of ESSA and the regulations issued under it.

“As the entomologist chasing butterflies of bright colors, my attention was seeking in the garden of gray matter, those cells of delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose fluttering wings would someday–who knows?–enlighten the secret of mental life.”

This last image reminds me of TS Eliot’s lines, in a completely different context, “And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall…”

Those quotations give me the same chill I always experienced when I passed the poster in our HS of Einstein, with the quote, “I want to know [God’s] thoughts, the rest are details.” I always thought this an act of colossal hubris, to seek to know the mind of God! “For My thoughts are not your thoughts…” These people have given in to the Satanic temptation to be equal to God. In the words of Paul VI, “The smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God.” And how.

This is why I consistently say that there is no dispute on intentions at te level of this story I have managed to get to. It’s simply that no one was supposed to be analyzing at this level.

Working on some more chilling confessions on this cloudy, chilly day. Turned on the tree lights for a bit of cheer–actually both trees as my youngest was very vocal on wanting a smaller tree too in the foyer, which happens to be where I do a lot of this reading.

I was having an Offline discussion about my Classical Ed posts that the Search Engine Overlord made me take down and how it fits. Did you know Classical Conversations is presenting at the Global Home Education conference that is turn pushing these Rio principles? http://therioprinciples.org/ Look at that March 2016 date.

Could there be a better summary of the role of education to push the Human Development Society?

Mercy me. Everything organized keeps coming out at the same vision.

Look at Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation and Michael Farris of HSLDA as speakers along with unesco. http://www.ghec2016.org/en/content/speakers No wonder Ms Burke would not let me post a comment on the Foundry touting charters where I warned people to actually READ the charters and not just assume it laid out an academic vision. In my experience it generally limits it in language that is reflective of those Rio Principles.

Sorry to be so course today but who actually wants to uncover these mysteries? Is it not enough to just live as we are? Not in tranzi, ergo the goal is change and the goal is to uncover the mystery to get in easier to manipulate minds. Its creepy and these people who are so deeply seeking these things remind me of mengele.
They are on payroll of those colonials still remembering the good old days of fuedalism and will do anything to get back there.

Remember that Betsy DeVos was on the board of AEI until she was nominated and that AEI, through Rick Hess, has always been tied to PEPG. Secondly, this says that Andy Smarick is also president of the Maryland State Board of Ed and an ed prof at Johns Hopkins. That puts him on the faculty with Lester Salamon, the author of the Tools of Government covered in this post.

I think I am going to start calling Ms DeVos, who seems to naively believe that this is all about her personal intentions to “help the children”–the Disingenuous Oligarch. That fits with her having been on the Board of both AEI and Jeb’s FEE. Plus the programs this AEI brief cites as School Choice are precisely the same categories she cites in her most recent American Federation for Children report. Teachers in the various states and parents should be the determinants of the actual effect of these Poison Accelerant programs hiding euphemistically behind the School Choice label.

When I try to give a heads up that the transformationalists believe they can legislation to force the Huamn Development Society and the MH vision I spoke about in the video, that is precisely what the law schools are teaching. It also seems to be what the Process Theory of the Law taught at Harvard and other elite schools for decades is about.

California led the way on Subject Matter Frameworks trying to dictate thinking and what the contents of the mind would be back in the 80s and it is at the forefront now. Notice that gives economic citizenship to every child who can make it to the state, with everyone else having a burden to support. That’s a lot of incentive to travel up from Central America, isn’t it?

Hi Robin – Was listening to your podcast with Nyquist.
One thing that struck me was that the lab for human cognition is in San Diego and AVID has many conferences in SD. They also do them in Denver, so it makes sense to me.
Also, who was the super in Oregon you were talking about? Can you email it to me if you don’t want to put it here?
Macey
PS Are you getting your Christmas ornaments out yet??

Avossa is now involved with Chiefs for Change. Lucrative salary bumps to push this vision.

My tree has been up for about two weeks and decorated for one. We let it drink up water with the drought before decorating it.

It is Michael Cole at the san diego lab, which also has ties to the BRAIN Initiative and MCREL is near Denver. They invented the Second Order Change template and were involved in the Achieving Excellence piloting that has ties to GERG as well as Columbine. I have a tag for bela banathy but read those early posts on what he hoped to shift via education. I have also written about the Asilomar Conferences. Basically, Csik, Riane Eisler, David Loye, Ervin Laszlo, and banathy are all tied to the Achieving Excellence template. It has always had a behavioral science meaning, even though the actual implications were not grasped.

I have a lot of those Byers Carolers and my daughters love to put them out first along with an olive wood creche from Israel. Traditions are nice, especially with the implications of what I read most days.

He makes much more now and a lifetime retirement is tied to the last three years. That means these Supers are making out better for life than people who built up multimillion dollar companies and then sold them. It takes a tremendous amount of capital to throw off the income that these school district supers are becoming qualified for.

Precisely. Remember my point in the video where I mentioned Everyday Math and Humanities in Everyday Life? Rose came to a district where the Area Supers in their meetings already quoted Kurt Lewin and his Freeze. Unfreeze. Refreeze behavioral change as a way to deal with recalcitrant vet teachers. The insiders also only referred to Humanities and STEM. Contrary to what parents still believe there are no genuine subjects anymore. Just the means of altering the belief system and role playing different scenarios.

I am so glad I am out, but one of his first speeches he pitched the need to move to STEAM. It is not what parents believe but it essentially joins the perspectives from STEM to those experienced through humanities. In fact I just realized that fits with the Ross School’s spiral curriculum. Mining and Manipulating those Mysterious Butterflies of the Mind may be the next title. I just have lots going on now, but it’s ready to be written. Middle child thinks gift wrapping is a higher priority.

When you talked about Everyday Math and Humanities I was thinking about Rose. I remember there was a huge deal about him pushing stuff that wasn’t actually teaching the kids…and then the question as to WHY he made so much money. Some parents in another district pulled their kids out for math, specifically because of Everyday Math. You’d think people would start putting it all together but their morons, sometimes. I say morons because there is a woman in Beaverton whom I tried to work with in the beginning of the whole Stop Common Core movement in Oregon…she was a complete moron. She bought what the district was selling hook, line, and sinker. She thought I was a total b*tch for even bringing up certain questions. She had a stupid meeting to discuss CC because of the concern around the “new” math. It was completely delphi-ed. She thought it was great.
UGH.

My grandfather always had a gorgeous one and my parents bought one when they went to the Holy Land. I was 14 when I went, in the December after the October Yom Kippur War.

Fabulous trip and I got to go in places in Jerusalem I am told are no longer open to tourists. Years later my inlaws were taking a trip and I suggested they bring us back the creche. The I had a friend going for a wedding and she brought back a camel.

We like our traditions, including that I like beautiful ornaments purchased half off on the 26th. I cook Christmas Eve, making an old-fashioned Bolognese with the 3 meats and milj and then white wine cooked out. It reminds my kids of the agriturismo we stayed at near Parma where the rooster crowed before dawn every morning. They made their own wine and I had to take a dictionary to fully grasp what we would be eating. We also still talk about how the huge trucks of pigs go into Parma and the empty trucks come out. Precious prosciutto.

I am thinking of adding a little pancetta this year. Luckily the requisite pappardalle noodles are now easier to find at grocery stores. One year the owner of an Italian restaurant sold me his supply at cost because he laughed that I was determined to find a particular noodle and knew the right one.

This is quite the conclusion given what we have been tracking here at ISC and in my book on why teaching read, math, and science properly creates a largely impenetrable Axemaker Mind.

“Perhaps, however, we embrace humanism just as we are losing our humanness. Technologists and futurists predict that genetically engineered superhumans and cyborgs are the future, possibly as soon as later this century. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, anticipates the disappearance of Homo sapiens as a species. Moving toward a world in which the digital and the physical realms merge—and biology no longer just means the study of natural but of engineered beings as well—it seems reasonable to cling ever more tightly to the consciousness and connections that make us human.

Harari describes the “cognitive revolution” occurring roughly 70,000 years ago, which gave Homo sapiens not simply the ability to communicate but to communicate in “fictive language,” the capacity to imagine things that do not exist—from love to art to law—and then to bring them to life. In a digital, automated, data-designed future, celebrating and advancing humanist values and, indeed, increasing our respect for all living beings may be the only way forward.”

Slaughter is also tied to that Daniel Kahneman Anne Treisman new Center at Princeton we have covered. I will find that link in a minute. Most importantly there is that the books I found talking about the new kinds of assessments desired that would get at what was internalized and that are now called “high quality” or “authentic” that was based on the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy from 1986, all reference the work on decision making in uncertain situations of Kahneman and Tversky. The latter died before the Nobel Prize so he was ineligible and Vernon Smith and Kahneman got it for pushing economics towards a merger with psychology. Now we have the same desire via transformative education hiding behind School Choice or Classical Education or Competency slogans. Investigating though keeps showing the same bullseye that some call the mind and others call the soul as the Ross School put it.

We also covered how Eldar Shafir was the first director, but Slaughter was also a listed member of the faculty.

All these butterflies make me want to burn my copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I will interject a funny story as I always added the line “And they fluttered away” when I read that story to my kids. Needless to say the toddlers and then four year olds go off to kindergarten thinking that was part of the story and very alarmed when their teachers left the true ending out. I hear from teachers AND my children, basically everyone but Eric Carle.

This is not about disease. It’s about mapping healthy systems to ultimately do what Koizumi, Kurt Fischer, Csik, Banathy, Ervin Laszlo, and others admit is an attempt to control without that shift in education’s purpose being widely recognized. What I talked about in that interview with Jeff Nyquist is more than fully substantiated by mounds of evidence when we know where to look.

I was going to include a section in my post about Ayan Hirsi Ali but it was getting too long. She has damning things to say about her own treatment and asks how feminist respect for islamic cultures is reconciled withforced marriages, honor killings, genital mutilation and the forced veiling of women?

Perfect marriage of SEL and Workforce. So glad somebody has taken the trouble to spell it out so I don’t have to.

I was thinking about Sandy Hook and wondering if it fit into your template of psychological-based schools that produce violence; it was the only one you didn’t refer to in the Nyquist interview. Sho nuff, here it is; I would have been astounded if a Newton school was anything but. And dang if they don’t feature a butterfly. This is getting weird.

I actually went on the Newtown school site on the day of the shooting before someone thought to take it down, as I did with Jim Holmes’ high school in San Diego, and the whole emphasis was on character development and the desired personal characteristics students were to develop like empathy. They had the visual of a tree with limbs of the desired traits to be fostered.

The new Heritage/TPPF paper on ESAs from Lindsey Burke and Jason Bedrick that came out yesterday cites for support to a Yuval Levin paper “The Roots of a Reforming Conservatism” that insists that “Moral progress must ultimately be achieved through the transformation of individual souls rather than made for them by society as a whole.” It literally lays out a vision for cultural evolution through education that is reminiscent of Julian Huxley and Brameld covered in my book. It also made Progressivism into quite the Strawman of mischaracterizations so it could portray what is actually an update of Marx as ‘conservative’. I also noticed Joy Pullmann today joined in with the mischaracterization of Marxian analysis and aim. She is either ignorant or deliberately misleading.

Here’s the quote: “So economists like Heckman and the Left more generally need to stop seeing people through the Marxist frame of mere economic actors, robotic objects we can upgrade through systems analysis.” Fact: Heckman is involved with the NIH-funded Science of Virtues that is tied to the Bradley-funded Witherspoon Institute. He is not using the Marxist frame of “mere economic actors,” he is using Marx’s early work to transform consciousness so man can be a Maker of History and transform reality. That Marxist frame as plenty of ed insiders have admitted.

The pincers have actually closed now on the vision being promulgated and we get to recognize the same vision being put out by the Right and the Left. I wish I had not had the become an expert on Marxism, but I now have a solid foundation on what Marxist Humanism is. When I was reading that Levin paper I thought of how stupid it was to link to it. Anyone familiar with Urie Bronfenbrenner’s work would recognize just how much of a strawman Levin created of the vision of the Left. They are actually quite fond of ‘mediating institutions’ too. I have piles of documentation devoted to proving that.

Notice the Newtown International Center for Education — NICE. That reminded me of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments — N.I.C.E. It doesn’t exist, except in C.S. Lewis novel, That Hideous Strength. Actually, it really does exist, in Great Britain (post-dating the novel, life imitating art) — The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, originally the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. I suspect it has something to do with whether you live or die.

I just bought a new ink cartridge for my computer. Guess what image is on the package. Now guess the brand. Of course, HP. Did I say this is getting weird? On the radio as I was driving home I heard that today was the Sandy Hook shooting anniversary.

Not as random as you think. I can recognize ideas, but Michael Horn is the common link among PEPG (he’s the Education Next editor now), that New School paper on philanthropy and innovative schools (he is thanked by name), and the Atlas Network members like Heritage, TPPF, the Independent Institute, Pope, Georgia Public Policy, APP, etc. He is a common speaker at their events. I have heard him three times at GPPF events and he’s the one whose use of “competencies, standards, and outcomes” as if they were all interchangeable synonyms went a long way towards grasping what was really intended by the Common Core.

There is extreme disingenuity going on here. Also remember that the Bradley Foundation finances Education Next’s publication in addition to being a formal PEPG sponsor and behind the History Commission we covered. They also own Encounter Books that is publishing Joy’s book on the Common Core. I was working on the Marxian analysis of all this this week in between dealing with some personal issues. When I was looking for that Levin paper (I had long since figured out the Fractured Republic book was pushing a communitarian vision), it showed that National Review, the Federalist (where Joy is an editor), and Reason had all pushed that same Levin paper when it came out in Spring 2015.

All of these papers appear to be written to be accepted at face value. They contradict provable facts. They are in fact pushing the Marxian Human Development Society and seeking to use the School Choice mantra to push the merger of Mind Brain and Education as the ‘science’ of engineering consciousness. Having the Federalist publish a what ‘science’ piece today from Jane Robbins and Karen Efrem was like watching a staged fight among secret lovers hoping no one would notice what is really going on. http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/14/using-schools-retrain-kids-emotions-possibly-go-wrong/

All the references to the “science” of education in scare quotes as if it has no meaning is absurd. The MBE work is what that is referring to and it is also grounded in what Howard Gardner called the potential of cognitive science more than 20 years ago as my book covered. I know that because I have so much of the MBE work now and it acknowledges the links to Gardner. This is Mengelian level psychological research going on involving real children and we have a deceit show going on about what is at stake. Those new Catholic Curriculum Frameworks also use that same “science’ of education being sneered at. I recognized the relevant buzz words being used.

That calls attention to textbooks, but the more powerful and pertinent effect now is through digital learning and the virtual reality visual worlds created explicitly to instill desired images of how the world works in the brain. Much easier to design software to create Guiding Fictions of causation and what can lead to the amelioration of a ‘real-world problem’ than it is to get nature or people to cooperate. At least until the people undergo personalized learning and competency-based ed grounded in behavioral science/MBE tenets.

Precisely. I am working through the most forthcoming book from 2010 on the MBE Science as it is called that everyone globally that is anyone participated in and it is about having the teachers become the researchers going forward in the classroom. All the factual links to the Soviet research are omitted as are the Resnicks and Michael Cole lest anyone connect the needed ‘standards’ to either the Common Core, OBE, or the New Standards Project. The teachers are just to regard this intersection of neuroscience (the brain), psychology (the mind), and education (pedagogy) as the new Best Practice as a better way to learn.

Notice that all references to Personally Identifiable Information as the relevant criteria are antiquated, which will certainly reduce the talking points of the Faux Privacy Narrative. No mention though of the Student Unit Record red herring. What an ending though for those of us out of law school now more than three decades. (my bolding but italics in original)

“Reimagining the relationship between technology and privacy law in the digital age should be seen as a key component of a larger effort aimed at addressing the current digital privacy crisis more holistically. Under contemporary conditions of complexity and uncertainty, the solution space for the multifacted privacy challenges of our time needs to do more than treat the symptoms of discrete privacy ills. It needs to combine approaches, strategies, and instruments that span all available modes of regulation in the digital space, including technology, markets, social norms, and the law. If pursued diligently and collaboratively, such a turn toward privacy governance could result in a future-oriented privacy framework that spans a broad set of norms, control mechanisms, and actors–‘a system of information privacy protection that is much larger, complex and varied, and likely more effective, than individual information privacy rights.’

Through such nuanced intervention, the legal system (understood as more than merely a body of constraining laws) can more proactively play a key role in coordinating the various elements and actors in the new governance regime, and–above all–in ensuring the transparency, accountability, and legitimacy that allow democratic governance to flourish.”

That’s the conclusion and then to show what a tool of the Social Sciences the law is seen as becoming we have a cite to an NSF funding grant on Privacy Tools in the Sharing Data project. In this Upravleniyevision laws clearly need to do more than constrain behavior. Good thing then they have MBE Science as a tool too and are using School Choice as a mantra to move all these poorly understood innovations beyond the ability of public authority to intervene to protect our children.

I felt like the Green Arrow typing that muttering about “protecting our city”. My kids like comic book TV characters.

Thanks for the link to “outdated textbooks”. SDGs (Social Development Goals) are being pursued — internationally. And they are being monitored by GEM (Global Education Monitoring) agency.

It seems that “out of date textbooks” are a real obstacle to achievement of these international social development goals. So, this report is being widely promoted, and guess what? The huge inference is that wholesale revisions of textbooks for high-schoolers all over the world should take place — urgently — and not in the usual 5-10 year cycles.

A good comment was made by a John Clegg that a higher order concern should be about whether students could even read. I made the following reply (in moderation):

But, the Reading Wars will interfere and sabotage all best intentions.

I agree with John Clegg that even before much attention is spent on review of high school textbooks it should be determined and ensured that students can at least read. I go back to my first sentence about the Reading Wars. Recently there was developed — for the World Bank Office of Human Development — an Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) Toolkit. This is to be a diagnostic tool to help customize programs for beginning readers in developing counties. Amazing effort and funds were spent on development of this approach.

But on page 4 of this 95 page document is this pointed observation: “The reading ‘wars’ are alive and well in many low-income countries, often miring ministries of education and teaching centers in seemingly endless debates between the ‘whole-language’ and ‘phonics-based’ approaches.”

To this day, from my watching the education world, the Reading Wars continue to undermine education efforts. Many high school students are not functionally literate. It is sad that of all fields of service to mankind the education field is largely immune to accountability for the human suffering inflicted on countless populations in the last half-century. It should be more harshly judged, not less.

Yes, I thought we had talked about that. As usual it is only part of the story. Just enough to get parents alarmed, but nothing to alert them that the privates and charters are doing comparable things and there is no desire to accumulate this as data.

They clearly want to stay away from the reality “that the primary goal of MBE Science is to understand how the brain learns and, more precisely, how neurons are changed in the brain based on experience.” The interest in emotions is not for a database, but because MBE Science regards emotions as “crucial to detecting patterns, decision making, and learning.” Our friends at USC, Immordino-Yang and Damasio, term it as “we feel, therefore we learn,” instead of the traditional Descartes view that education used to emphasize–“I think, therefore I am.”

Jane Robbins and Karen Effrem seem so intent on building up red herrings surrounding the true nature of the implementation that they should keep metaphorical flashlights handy to find their own pathways back to the truth. I had already written in margin by that I-Y/ Damasio quote that it’s not about a database of PII.

DML is funded by the same MacArthur Foundation that funded the Real Utopias Project and gave a genius grant to Angela Duckworth for her Grit work. She spoke at jeb’s most recent conference and he heads the outside advisory group for PEPG.

Howard Rheingold is on the Board of the Global Education Futures Forum 2030/2035 partnership between MIT and Skolkovo in Moscow.

Via education reforms that are being misexplained to the typical parent and practices that the typical teachers is being told are “scientifically based,” everything is now in place to create that desired new kind of thinking laid out in your link. Remember Tom VanderArk said much the same when he returned from a GEFF forum in Russia.

“Through the ‘biopolitics of the brain sciences,’ the ‘cerebral knowledges’ of neuroscience are coming to play a significant role in contemporary techniques of governance, whereby
‘experts of the brain, rather than of “psy” or society,’ are understood to be addressing
societal challenges, and ‘governing the conduct of human beings [has] come to require, presuppose and utilize a knowledge of the human brain’ (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2014, pp. 3–5). As a result, neuroscientific developments have become entwined with strategies
designed to govern human conduct by drawing upon the growing availability of empirical knowledge of the brain”

“As noted earlier, one of the key concepts of the brain sciences is neuroplasticity. The understanding of the brain’s malleability has become a dominant neuroscientific claim, not just at IBM’s Brain Lab. Methodological inquiries have ascertained that the brain is open to environmental input, with the environment shaping the neural architecture and
functional organization of the brain through the formation, strengthening and trimming of synaptic connections. As a result of recent discoveries around neural plasticity, there is emerging consensus that neurobiological mechanisms exist through which ‘environments
get encoded in brains’ and aspects of social life are incorporated into neurobiological structures (Fitzgerald & Rose, 2015). The result of this emerging ‘imaginary of plasticity’ (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013) is that new techniques are now being devised to recognize and manage the processes involved in shaping and reshaping the brain which promote the idea that the brain is flexible, mouldable, able to be trained, re-wired, improved, and ultimately optimized. The imaginary of plasticity instantiates the social within the neurobiological, with new understandings of ‘the social life of the brain’ being used to animate policies
and practices in healthcare, education, and other social domains (Pickersgill, 2013, p. 322). IBM’s cognitive classroom, as a cognitive environment inhabited by cognitive tutors, is illustrative of the imaginary of plasticity being materialized in pedagogic form. In this imagined space, cognitive systems that have been built to emulate the plasticity and neural networks of the brain are to be put to pedagogic work as cognitive tutors that might
‘re-wire’ the neural circuits underpinning human learning itself.”

It was what Tranzi OBE was actually intended to do and now it hides as competency-based education. Whether Betsy DeVos understands this or not or even Jeb Bush, this is where all their so-called reforms lead. This is what Donald Trump will be implementing, especially if he really is getting staffers from the George 43 and jeb shops.

Making people believe this is about a PII datbase is practically criminal in my mind. Ultimately I believe the deceit is grounded in the paymasters of these think tanks wanting to be able to use the transformative templates of behavioral sciences without that being understood. At least the admitted Left pulls no punches about its intentions.

I just finished a Tokuhama book from 2010 that is for teachers who will never know the actual background of what they are being told is “scientifically-based” best practices. It also fits with what ESSA mandates and what will make a CMO ‘effective’ or ‘evidence-based’ and thus entitled to federal funds for interstate expansion.

This is the comment I was going to make to Deborah before blog decided to be on the fritz and I went to the grocery store.

I have now made it through that linked paper “Computing brains” and collected those amazing confessions. I also wrote in margin ‘control’ human cognition for each time the article mentioned ‘optimize’. Having been at a memorial service yesterday for a family friend who died both too young and suddenly, it is a little raw to read such open machinations even though none of that is news to me. It fits with what I have documented for the CtD sequel and is a par for the course example of the kind of dense prose I have to penetrate and then dumb down to something more easily graspible.

This relates not just to the ‘systems of systems’ work I laid out in CtD, but also to the Neuroeconomics work going on at the Mercatus Center at George Mason. We have talked about it some in posts and more in comments, but I remember the IBM connection to that DARPA research was in one of the forums organized.

Secondly, and this relates directly to Betsy DeVos and her ed advocacy even if she herself is unaware of the connections. The Statutory authorization of the kind of intrusive Mengelian neurobiological manipulation described in that article is what is actually, and surreptitiously, authorized by the actual language in the language of the model ‘Student Privacy’ statute created by the same Jeb Bush Foundation for Excellence in Education where DeVos was on the Board.

Plus, I like alliteration, but who thought a confession as a publicly-held company to wanting to Model, Morph, and Modify the Mind was a good idea? Mercy, that’s the kind of thing that makes a great epigraph to a chapter. I can’t wait to be able to quote a confession about “intervening in the cognitive lives of human subjects.” Not only is there no Godwin’s Law for Mengele references, it is actually sickeningly apt.

IBM was intimately involved in the “data management” of Hitler’s death camps. See “IBM and The Holocaust.” Bending minds as contrasted with slavery and/or gassing bodies dead or alive may strike some as an improvement in the hierarchy of moral values. But neither manifests a particularly high degree of respect for human autonomy and dignity.

“It offers an alternative, geographically informed set of explanations for what matters in explaining how people behave and how citizens’ behaviour should be governed. It will be of interest to students and academics across the social and behavioural sciences.”

Holy Balls!
“ways the most challenging and fascinating stuff in this whole territory [of behaviour change] is once you start asking how do you influence essentially the policy not only of a rational government, but also unconscious processing systems (former Cabinet Office policy strategist (2), interviewed October 2009)”

No one was trying to call attention to it last week when it actually came out.

“5. The need for public support for evidence
Persuading politicians and those controlling the money is not enough. In democracies,
we also need to persuade the public. ‘In order to actually get politicians to care, you have
to get the public to care’, as the head of one nongovernment body put it. Voters should be
voting for desirable priorities and outcomes, such as better health, improved schools, and
more jobs. ‘Where evidence comes in is finding the best way to get there.’ One government
official voiced the concern, ‘If politicians start to tell us the mechanism of how to get from A
to B, then there is no room for evidence.’
A European member of parliament told the forum that we shouldn’t shy away from the fact
that evidence does not give easy answers, stating: ‘Democracy is about controversy, and
good science is also about controversy.’ We need to improve the evidence culture and ‘have
more evidence-based discussions in society as a whole—in schools, in business, and other
dimensions’. We need to consider shifting the debate to focus more on ‘critical thinking and
about the process, and less about finite fact’. This needs to be taught in schools, and it needs to
be understood that there is an ‘ongoing evolution, and that there is never one fact, and that the
results of research are always changing’.”

I am getting very tired being told by people what I am supposed to be led to believe in support of their utopian plan to change the future.

Judging by lack of people at the upscale mall this morning where I had to return something it is hard to believe it will be a financially merry christmas.

Trump ed advisor Bill Evers, the main author of the cited Closing the Door on Innovation is also a fellow at this Independent Institute. This analysis is not independent. It’s a coordinated false narrative and it consistently misrepresents the nature of PISA and TIMSS.

“We will rule over you through your children’s minds, locked in neurobiologically and you have no recourse” is the new Bipartisan Congressional slogan. Echoed, unfortunately by governors, city council members, legislators, and too many executive branch appointees of presidents from both parties going back decades.

Goldie in video below is so confused! She thinks there is too much anger and we have to get rid of it by her program MindUp in the classroom. Too much fear ( stop showing kids fearful images of the fake news psyops and terror!) alas but then it would be too hard to condition them to discount their natural fight or flight feelings to use naturally inate self preservation tools building independant intellegence.

Duckworth solving all the world’s problems agsin!
How far this public school math teacher has come! Hmmm. Don’t you want to smack them?! ” meaningful progress” OMG.
MYOB comes to mind as well as Orwell.

Both Goldie Hawn and Angela Duckworth are global problem hawkers. As if our children are responsible for the entire solar system. It fits the new cognition and all the mind molding and warping. Just two streams of justification for mind arson. Leading away from individualism, away from Christian philosophy of individual choice and responsibility to Global collective responsibility for the Hive, not the self. Back to , “my brain did it” not me. Putting the whole world on children’s shoulders, where they cannot have any success and teaching them how to cope, have GRIT, to live with the ineffective abilities and disappointment of this mindset, through State safe space and bubblewrap popping parties and mindfulness exercises creating pacification and state approved harmony.

I was thinking about the iceberg graphic that goes with the Tranzi OBE I covered in my book that fits with what Hawn, Duckworth, Dweck, and honestly Jeb Bush and Betsy DeVos all want to push via education reforms and School Choice. The underwater realm of the iceberg fits with all that we now know, and Spady and Spence Rogers knew when they created the template, and it’s the explicit targeting of what is internalized that guides perception and then the interpretation of daily experiences. I have discovered that the kind of political philosophers who quality communism with the phrase ‘Soviet-style’ and socialism as Soviet as if they have better ideas for a collective future all focus on the need to control the nature of individual rationality and the prevailing ‘ideas, concepts, and categories’.

Thanks. The political radicalists know they must control both the nature of thinking as well as each Individual’s self-identity. Radical Ed Reform, accurately understood, gets at both. Kahnemann’s work goes to that. Now we know why my research found the type of Competencies laid out in Credentialed to Destroy

In retrospect, they either go to the nature of internalized thought or self-identity. Another way to say that would be one is iner-directed and the other-outer directed–how the world and reality is seen. We have a convergence going on here once we can accept the disconnect of grasping what has been and is being pushed invisibly on us and our children through education. Just because all this was designed to elude detection and thus any effective public outcry and rejection doesn’t mean we now do not have every right to both detect and protest at every political level. Trump ran on the antithesis of this and someone in authority in his future administration needs to get up to speed on the true nature of education reform over the last 50 years. Quit listening to the likes of Bill Bennett or anyone associated with the Hoover Institution.

Came across this today in a group. Poked around and noticed the Harvard board. wonder where MBE work fits with the assessment. Interesting feel good word, holistic assessment, Oregon would embrace it with that name.http://www.pearweb.org/tools/hsa.html

That fits perfectly with the merger of mental health and socio-development via education into subjective wellbeing–the new primary responsibility of governments. Remember that edict by David Cameron and Obama back in late 2013? The MBE work fits in because that fits with the Individual-in-Context where the internalized state is the domain of political authority now (must eliminate evil) and external behaviors and what prompts them are as well.

That has been true since before the OBE push of the 90s. It just was not fully laid out until CtD came along. Even now we are grasping that the neurbiological implications are the goal, not just an obvious side effect. Yesterday I finished an Education Commission of the States book from 1991 that made it quite clear once again that the local is the domain where political authority in a democracy can decree what knowledge and habits of mind each student is to know in a ‘democracy’. It also talked about political authority and its right to use education to shape against undesired behaviors and a communitarian ethos.

This is same author at same time period. http://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v10n1/brown.pdf It sounds so current and those Educational Creativity Zones in Colorado sound just like what gets hyped as School Choice now. The aspect that these have ceased to be traditional schools beyond the rhetoric gets missed.

This is an update of a similar vision of the type of mindset desired that transformed education is to structure. http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/uploads/attachment/525/political-literacy-and-civic-thoughtfulness.pdf Gives the reasons why too and the vision of the future. SYNETOPIA . Elsewhere I have seen it referred to as forcing a shift from ‘economic rationality’ to ‘communicative rationality.’ I also learned this week that Daniel Kahnemann was part of that Stiglitz report shifting the focus from GDP to wellbeing that was supposedly created at Sarkozy’s request in 2009. Cass Sunstein and Angus Deaton were also involved and Amartya Sen was one of the head authors. It listed Sen as back at Harvard. Archon Fung of the same Kennedy School where PEPG is located sent out an email that in 2017 the emphasis would shift fully into realizing democracy in the 21st century.

All this is a reminder once again how long this template has been around and how consistent it is.

Hope your holiday plans are coming together nicely. I keep trying to do my running around early so I can stay off the roads in the afternoon. Having three major interstates, I-20, I-85, and I-75 all cross in downtown Atlanta makes this city a zoo all week. Back roads are my friend.

Husband just told me that we are out of wet cat food and then asked why when I said that meant I need to go to store in next hour. College kid last night left me a note by my phone that none of the Christmas decorations could come down until she went back to college. Better keep watering the tree.

What it is is Preemptive Authoritarianism. Instead of forthrightly limiting behaviors, you circumscribe the basis that motivate behaviors and interprets daily experiences. Then you dictate, via edicts like UDL and the same ‘standards’ for all students, that the everyday classroom must be experiential and grounded in real life scenarios and oh by the way, the school will provide the ‘categories. concepts, and ideas’ the students are to use for that mandated interpretation. Future behavior becomes quite predictable and constrained but that’s not visible to the student or the adult they become.

Then suddenly someone or something unanticipated like Trump’s election or the Boston marathon bombing comes along and the students cannot cope. It doesn’t fit within their panoply of permitted ideas. That seems to be who this nonsensical Election Hacking meme is playing to. Much better than Podesta is an idiot that fell for a Phishing scam that caused factual information to fall into the public domain that the news media had not intended to cover.

I am almost done with the ASCD book I mentioned and it is so on point with the actual focus all along that it practically makes me dizzy with ire. First it makes it crystal clear that the purpose of ‘standards-based reforms’ a/k/a OBE and the Common Core or competency-based education has ALWAYS been to alter the physiological structure of the brain to create the desired compliant citizen. Secondly, the Classical Ed vision Hillsdale, Barney, Joy, Terrence Moore, that Catholic Curriculum Framework etc are all pushing fits 100% within the template laid out.

I also have a recent history book sponsored by Hoover and funded by the Bradley Foundation with Douglass North as the lead writer that reimagines all social sciences, history included, to get at how the brain interprets experience. There is a commonality here that was unexpected and I only got that book because it described in a footnote that North was a former Marxist and then used what I recognized to be a Marxian analysis. This Bradley F sponsoring once a get a cited but troubling book seems to be happening about as often as the Preface thanking the people at CASBS in Palo Alto.

Hope you have fun plans in the works for New Years Eve. Still getting used to being here after all the years at the beach. Got the black eyed peas and collard greens as luck and prosperity would be nice. It certainly worked last year when it comes to the luck of accurately recognizing the intentions and background of what I am looking at.

First of my children has already departed. College kid insists none of the decorations can come down until after she leaves.

More timely confirmation we are on the right track. https://www.middleweb.com/33648/managing-the-inner-world-of-teaching/ Pertinent to both of us as we both have had our eye on what the Thinking Skills Framework created in the 80s for McREL was really all about. Second Order Change begins with altering what this article calls the student’s self system. Notice to that altering and calling that learning instead of creating a staic database on its characteristics is the aim of so much of the deceit we have monitored in 2016 by people like Jane Robbins and Emmett McGroarity, Donna Garner, Joy Pullmann, and others who even wrote a letter to Congress to cement the False Narrative before moving on to hype a false definition surrounding Evidence-Based PolicyMaking.

present a model based on three decades of research into the operations of the human mind in various situations. Notice the author questions all the documented research laid out as unnecessary. Not at all, the authors want these practices to clearly qualify as ‘evidence-based’ under ESSA and thus entitled to federal funding.

Hope you had a delightful Christmas. Yesterday was the last family gathering and my tenderloin was a big success. Someone offline sent me the link to the school Joy Pullmann is pushing. https://fortwayneclassical.com/about-faq/our-story/ If we honestly believe that Common Core was news to the editor of School Reform News, which is distributed to every legislature in the US and a partner in PEPG, we would be targets for buying oceanfront land in Arizona or Idaho. At the time she is talking about Jeb Bush, that great pusher of the Common Core, chaired the PEPG Executive Committee.

Joy got a book deal from Encounter because of her willingness to deceive parents and tell the story that served the Bradley Foundation’s goals. The really cool thing though is her arrogance to show how well-connected this school will be https://fortwayneclassical.com/about-faq/advisors/ takes a number of entities I know are related because of the synonyms used and how it all functions. Bless her Balderdashing Arrogance! She openly embraces Olga Block and the personalizedategic vision and what was laid out in those GEHC UNESCO documents.

All those are now tied conclusively to School Choice and the Bradley Foundation by her open embrace and proclamation. It feels like the scene in Hunt for Red October where the safety was taken off the torpedoes and now they are coming straight at the people who set them off. I am guessing whoever wrote this wanted to engage in the classical Appeal to Authority fallacy and did not know this list ties all this to the Soviet cybernetic template and the Educational Excellence Network and Project Education Reform: Time for Results and what the Education Commission of the States was pushing in the 80s as Schools of Thought.

It also fits with what the Encounter (Bradley Foundation’s publishing house) FH Buckley book The Way Back from April 2016 called for and Yuval Levin’s work. We already covered upthread that he had won the Bradley award and received much support. Too few people grasp that all those ‘revered’ public policy think tanks actually exist to ensure that elections at any level and at any time do not depart from the MH pathway. I have a Paul Peterson (head of PEPG) and John Chubb book written during the Reagan years when they were still formally at Brookings that might as well have the title Elections Cannot Change Where We are Headed.

The goal of this development grant is to increase the accessibility, flexibility, usability, and scalability of the BEST in CLASS (Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Training: Competent Learners Achieving School Success) intervention by developing a web-based version. This grant is a subcontract with the University of Florida from the U. S. Department of Education.
PROJECT PERIOD
8/1/16 – 7/31/19
FUNDING AGENCY
Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education

Thanks and let’s all get ready to keep this dialogue going in 2017 given what was funded in the twilight of this Admin when it is not stabbing Israel in the back.

I have just discovered that the ASCD’s push just after the Enschede vision of a common core laid out in Credentialed to Destroy was to push the links between biological visions of learning via neuroscience to the perceptual-experiential emphasis of psychology. Turns out to have been what ‘standards’ were always tied to. No wonder there is so much deceit. Going through the ASCD template it is quite easy to see how the Classical ED template Joy’s school laid out and what the Barney Charter and other initiatives, like the Catholic Curriculum Framework we have tracked, are pushing is what ASCD laid out is the brain-based way to meaningful knowledge.

Pay attention to that SYNETOPIA Framework linked above and the admission that “for democratic politics to work, much will depend on our ability to act thoughtfully in relation to each other.” That is what BEST is getting at as well.

She was also involved with the New Standards Project in the 90s that built on Project Education Reform: Time for Results.

If she is coming to Texas, it is because you are at a culminating stage for her vision of how education can be used transformationally. My research has shown that to be true and NSP actually had an office in FT Worth because it was a pilot for what we now know as the Common Core and performance standards generally.

Thank you, Robin. Your Credentialed to Destroy book was very helpful to my research. The part about ‘distributed intelligence’ is exactly what they are using PBL for in our schools. Vygotsky would be so proud 🙁

That would fit with Resnick being part of the Executive Committee for ISCAR’s conference in Rome a few years ago with the creator of CHAT and Luria’s translator, Prof Michael Cole, and Learning by Expansion’s Yrjo Engestrom. ISCAR stands for International Society for Cultural Activity Research. PBL is the ultimate in the requisite experiential emphasis instead of transmissive, crystallized knowledge.

Her emphasis on Transfer to new contexts and situations of the concepts and categories from various disciplines is also known as meaningful learning and Bridging.

Happy New Year. LRDC where she works is also tied to Neuroeconomics and the Carnegie Mellon LEARNSPHERE grants. Her husband Daniel is a history prof at Carnegie Mellon and is the co-author of numerous Transfer articles with her. She is also involved with the trademarking of the term Accountable Talk. I first encountered that looking at the Dallas ISD.

Black eyed peas and greens all made up here. Can you tell I am a Southern girl? My next post should also help. I just couldn’t write it during the holidays without feeling like Grinch determined to put coal into the stockings of people’s lives.

If we followed this blog (ISC) throughout 2016 we would have seen tons of links to organizations promoting their insights about needed education transformations. Most (probably 95%) had elaborate graphs, diagrams, flow-charts and roadmaps showing the inevitable great results to be had.

If one photocopied — in full color — all these charts and posted them on the walls of a school gym one would be knocked out by the psychedelic overload!

My nominee for the most astounding and scary chart is this roadmap from Global Education Futures (GEF). But be warned, you won’t be able to read it as is — I had to enlarge it at a print shop to size 24” X 36” and had to use strong reading glasses: Global Education 2015-2035 http://edu2035.org/pdf/GEF_future-map_en.pdf

The state Atlas member did a program back in December on the new state student funding formula, but refused to take open questions. Everything had to be submitted on cards and then the President, Kelly McCutcheon, culled what he was willing to have asked. I had not intended to ask anything, but began to wonder what he thought I would have recognized and might share with the group. Later that day while I was making dinner and musing over a funding formula that weights for poverty and needs it hit me that it would skew state tx money away from the affluent metro areas to the rural areas where virtually everyone is close to poverty. The local schols then become a middle class jobs program while the students get a locked-in belief system that governments exist to see that their ‘needs’are met.

The Robin Hood redistribution of local property taxes is capped. This redistribution of state sales taxes and income taxes would not be. If you add a refundable state and federal EITC and it will work like a GIC for the most part, but be invisible. Just like Marx envisioned, the rural areas would be supported by the prosperous cities.

All that was in December after Trump’s election. Unfortunately this is something that many of the Atlas Network members have been clamoring for too–AEI, Cato, and Reason. AEI’s call was while Betsy DeVos was on the Board.

Not shocked. The way Design Thinking was employed in my kids former school was under the umbrella of Entrepreneurship. The end game was kids figuring out how to create business models for impoverished girls in third world nations that usually involved making bracelets. For Fair Trade of course.

WOW ! Time to think again ! What is education for? Is it for jobs? For democracy? For perpetuation of the system or to radically change it? Learning to collaborate? Learning to avoid homelessness? What?

The education field has been rife and ridden with fads and frills for generations and it’s a wonder that people still send their kids to schools. Maybe it’s just a safe place for kids while growing up. Certainly the 3Rs are “old hat”. Graduate’s Math skills are reported as deplorable and functional illiteracy is stated at 40% of the population.

The latest education buzzword (fad) is Design Thinking.

Basically, it’s yet another variation of what has beset the whole 20th C education industry — progressivism, the John Dewey method of experiential learning — learning by doing — teacher as guide by the side not sage on the stage — discovery, inquiry — education is “caught”, not “taught”, etc., etc., etc.

One parent (mc) has just posted that under the “umbrella of Entrepreneurship” her school used Design Thinking to help solve “poverty” problems in developing countries. A business model was drawn up whereby impoverished girls would make bracelets for a Fair Trade organization. The Atlantic article referenced above says Design Thinking has “gone viral despite scant objective data regarding its effectiveness for learning”.

Many teachers adopt progressive methods because they don’t like the drill of didactic teaching. Others are romantics and do want to save the world! The Atlantic article states that they see themselves as “helping their students learn through solving real-world problems”.

Well, here’s a real-world problem. Many Think Tanks, including some of the most conservative free-market types, are seriously exploring the expansion of the womb-to-tomb welfare state. These are some of the plans: GAI (Guaranteed Annual Income); UBI (Universal Basic Income); ESP (Economic Security Project); BIG (Basic Income Guarantee). Finland is already into its first week of the Western world’s first UBI as national policy.

My question is this: Since our Thought Leaders think UBI is the inevitable direction of our economic system how soon before public schools start injecting this topic into the classrooms? Is there an alternative? Will broader private and public education choices avert this slippery slope to universal state dependency?

Not as long as the broader public and private choices continue to be using Bela Banathy’s template for the transformation of education to a focus on what the student has internalized to be the basis of both their unconscious actions and their conscious decisionmaking. It showed up in that Catholic Curriculum Framework that came out late in 2016 and the Pioneer Institute announced in December that the Framework would also be used in Jewish schools. The essence of the Tarbiyah Project was using it in Muslim-oriented schools.

Contrary to what was put in that Pioneer/APP paper misrepresenting the nature of competency-based education in public schools, they too have a focus on what is internalized that functions just like the Catholic Curriculum Framework, except with different explanations and terminology. Same function though. It’s also what any template, such as the one the Independent Institute, Heritage, Heartland, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation are now pushing on homeschoolers when they call for ‘high-quality assessments’ as a condition for ESAs.

Finally, Michael Farris of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and Classical Conversations, purportedly the Amway of homeschooling from what people contacted by them have said, were at the inaugural Global Homeschool Education Conference in Rome in 2012 and in Brazil in 2016. It calls for homeschoolers to adhere to the state’s standards, which of course incorporates the behavioral science template. So does the Barney Charter School initiative. One of their schools was advertising about how the students were being prepared for ‘virtuous living’ and ‘responsible citizenship’. Plus if you read Joy Pullmann’s articles for its schools for the Federalist, she uses the behavioral science terms consistently. Donna Garner in Texas did the same thing recently touting the new Texas English Standards. All these programs have decided that the purpose of education is to create a steerable internalized rudder that makes future behavior largely predictable and controllable is what they get paid for. They also lie to parents about it.

School Choice is a fallacy trying to put this evil template into place without parents recognizing what they have agreed to in time. I am also now convinced that much of the organized anti-Common Core blogs and testimony before state legislatures has been about controlling the narrative so that this time the full template can be put in place. There is a limit to the disclosure and a pattern to the deceit and it all points to not wanting to admit the use of this cybernetic internalized rudder that governs perception and everyday actions.

Your last sentence Tunya “Will broader private and public education choices avert this slippery slope to universal state dependency?” indicates you are not reading the comments here, only the posts themselves and even those less than carefully. It has been both a hectic and tragic month since I last wrote, but things appear ready to get put back into place. Yesterday we were without power much of the day after a tree came down from the ice. Luckily I had my books and a nice throw to put around my shoulders while I read.

Anthony Biglan in his 2015 book The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World makes it crystal clear that the Promise Neighborhoods vision was a piecemeal approach to the shift to a Human Development Society. UBI is another component. He even cited a 2011 report he was a part of from the Promise Neighborhoods Research Consortium called ” Creating nurturing environments: A science-based framework for promoting child health and development within high-poverty neighborhoods.”

Betsy DeVos’ speeches and her AFC reports talks about education for children to meet their “full potential”. That is straight out of the English interpretation of Karl Marx’s vision whether she grasps that or not. That is what she is pushing. It’s what Trump is pushing too, even if for him it is inadvertent because his advisors are not bothering to accurately pass on the history or translations of these terms. We are playing with fire here and using the law via regulation and legislation and education to put Marx’s vision invisibly in place while calling it science, research, or evidence-based. I noticed how Donna Garner kept hyping how the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills had been decided by a ‘duly-elected’ State Board of Education as if that gives people the right to impose Fascism while misrepresenting the nature of learning standards. I also noticed she has taken up misrepresenting the nature of what Constructivism is. I seriously doubt that is accidental, whether Donna appreciates why she is being directed to push a certain template or not. It also fits with What is Common Core trying to insist that agency-based education is different from competency-based education using the false definitions in the Pioneer/APP paper.

I had a conversation with a colleague in the ed wars here in Colorado. She told me she had shared that graphic with members of the State Board of Ed and members of the State legislature. She said they understood the implications — and didn’t care.

Not that I remember unless it ties to what Colorado is piloting that clearly treats the students as a manipulable system. Since the writer and advocate for 21st Century Skills also teaches leadership and systems thinking at a university in Colorado named for an 11th century Tibetan Buddhist monk, the real goal to change the student’s internalized mindset is crystal clear. https://www.naropa.edu/

This sounds much like the actual K-12 implementation unfortunately, doesn’t it?–“Integrating traditional academics, contemplative practice, and experiential learning.” Of course, we know that traditional academics was mental, not experiential, but why alert parents to the incongruities they are being asked to fund.

Still dealing with an at-home college kid today whose motto seems to be “why drive myself if I can ask mom to take me places.” At least I am not stuck with preschoolers not yet in school like I just saw at the unusually crowded grocery store.

You know that fortune was created when IBM bought them out and that Spencer created that when he was still a student at U-Chicago?

I had hoped to get something up today but we have a snowstorm coming and I am in charge of supplies. I have got the quote though that we are to be “governed by our brains.” Fits with what public and private and parochial and homeschoolers have all committed to once we grasp what ‘standards’ are. No wonder the conniving Bill Bennett is so ecstatic about the Disingenuous Oligarch being the new Ed Sec. Everything coming together at the same time I have all the documented neurobiological handoffs.

This is from the winter edition of the Phi Beta Kappa journal from Amitai Etzioni. https://theamericanscholar.org/we-must-not-be-enemies/# He admits what we knew but the news media did not advertise–the extent to which Hiallary Clinton has fully embraced communitarianism a long time ago. Notice too how his book The Active Society is suddenly the one being touted. Previously it was quite hidden. Also remember his ties to Mary Ann Glendon and thus the new Catholic Curriculum Framework. Having read the Active Society, it does fit with where the Curriculum Framework seeks to go. All influenced by the CASBS vision of what the Behavioral Sciences can achieve in effecting Marx’s Human Development Society a/k/a Spirit Society, cooperative commonwealth, the Nurture Society.

Simply by reading fiction, students must decipher the feelings and mental states of characters who may not be saying or acting in line with their emotions. Teachers who assign pieces of imaginative literature ask students to do this work and amplify the impact by getting students to discuss the stories and their interpretations of them. These conversations offer practice with civil discourse, and they force students to think about other students’ perspectives and possible interpretations of a single text.

“There’s something very powerful about that and also something very egalitarian about it,” Coulson says. “The teacher moves out of the role of didactic expert who’s going to tell you what you should think about this. Instead, you engage students in this other way.”

Students need to develop a sense of media literacy and critical thinking that will allow them to fulfill their roles in a democracy. Reading nonfiction can help that.

Nothing like all this priming for our roles in a democracy. So important that we must be neurally rewired for it. No wonder the behavioral scientists developed the School Choice fraudulent meme to cover up this heartbreaking reality.

Calling anyone a moron or even indicating a point is stupid would be a violation of the now requisite Positive School Climate and Affirmative Student Codes of Conduct. It would make the student anxious to share their ‘perspective’ and we cannot have that. Seriously, I have read enough of what has led to these classroom visions.

Good thing I am not in the classroom now as I often classify truly clueless adults as “having to concentrate to pee.” We all know how much I love a good metaphor. Having to change my youngest’s plane flight because of incoming winter storm. At least it will not be a 28-inch blizzard like what happened to us in NYC last January.

Justice-oriented giving is an act of righting a wrong, leveling the playing field, and removing the illusion of recipients as “less fortunate.” It fully acknowledges past circumstances that have driven inequalities, and prompts givers to recognize the advantages some groups and individuals have gained over others from years of economic and racial injustices—advantages that made generational success and prosperity that much more attainable.

And later in the article and consistent with what I warned about in Credentialed to Destroy:

“Individual communities and philanthropic program efforts often engage in siloed causes that bifurcate economic, social, and educational policies and practices, rather than integrate them in ways that can lead to transformative change. So while well-implemented programs have potential for impact, they do not necessarily lead to systemic change.”

I am actually not the one saying that these Education Reforms cannot be understood outside of their actual intentions. After all, Lamar Alexander, as TN Governor and head of NGA and Bill Bennett as fed Ed Sec called it Time for Results for a reason.

Notice that one of the co-authors in the Chief Community Officer for the Tennessee Achievement School District. Both are tied to the Hamilton Center for Race and Justice at Harvard Law. It is a mistake not to recognize that the PEPG vision at the school of Government and the individual-in-context and MBE programs at the School of Ed where the student and their internlaized mental and emotional processing are viewed as a system that can be assessed, monitored, and manipulated, and this use of the law to force the Marxist Humanist vision into place are unrelated.

They too are different elements of the same desire to manipulate human ‘systems’ as if they were physical systems.